How Boko Haram is Turning Children into Weapons
By Sarah Kaplan
May 27, 2015
It was just past noon when a blast tore through the bustling Monday Market in Maiduguri, shattering buildings and tearing through flesh.
When the dust settled, police counted 18 wounded and 20 people killed. The bomber was among them, her tiny body ripped in two by the timed device she wore around her waist.
“It’s a little girl,” a hospital official told the New York Times. “The body is beyond recognition, but from the face you can see it’s a young person. A young pretty girl.”
The north-eastern Nigerian city was accustomed to violence — Maiduguri, considered a stronghold of the militant group Boko Haram, has been under fire for years. But the suicide bombing on Jan. 10 was a whole new kind of horrifying: A young girl, no more than 10 years old, had been turned into a weapon of war.
“It’s something quite new, and it’s disturbing, using these young, young girls wearing Hijabs,” a top federal police official told the Times (a Hijab is a headscarf worn by Muslim women).
In the months since, Boko Haram has used the tactic with alarming frequency, UNICEF announced Tuesday. The U.N. group has recorded 27 suicide bombings in northeast Nigeria since the start of 2015 — more than were counted in all of last year. In at least three-quarters of the incidents, women and girls were used to carry out the attacks.
“Children are not instigating these suicide attacks; they are used intentionally by adults in the most horrific way,” Jean Gough, UNICEF Representative in Nigeria, said in a press release. “They are first and foremost victims – not perpetrators.”
But in northern Nigeria, where persistent violence from Boko Haram has much of the region on edge, communities are quick to view any suspicious-seeming child as a threat. That’s what happened in Bauchi, a regional capital in the northeast, where a mob beat a teenage girl to death and set her body ablaze after she refused to be frisked with a metal detector at an entrance to a local vegetable market. Her attackers believed she was carrying explosives in two plastic bottles strapped to her waist, but police said that was unlikely. They describe the killing as a “mob action carried out by an irate crowd.”
“There is a habitual atmosphere of insecurity that anything can happen at any time,” Aminu Gamawa, a Bauchi native and conflict resolution expert at Harvard University, said in a phone interview with The Post after the attack. “Anybody can be a victim, and sometimes it’s hard to know who is going to be a perpetrator.”
The suicide bombings are just one way Boko Haram has made Nigeria fearful of its own children.
A group of more than 250 former Boko Haram captives have been held in military custody for weeks out of suspicion that they still sympathize with their abductors, according to the Associated Press. Earlier this month, a soldier at a refugee camp where they were staying falsely accused one of the women of attempting to grab his gun and claiming she was a Boko Haram member — two days later the group was shuttled onto a military plane and flown to an undisclosed location. Two hundred of the people in the group were children under the age of 5. The rest were young women and girls.
When asked about the relocation, National Emergency Management Agency spokesman Sani Datti told the AP that it was an “entirely military affair.”
Counselors who worked with the group told the AP that only one person had expressed any sympathy to the militants — a four year old boy whose parents had been members and who openly boasted that his father would slit people’s throats. The child was later removed from the refugee camp out of fear that he might be killed otherwise.
But stories like that of the young boy, or of abducted women who were turned into a human shield and fired on their rescuers, tap into deep-seated fears of Boko Haram’s ability to brainwash its captives. Kidnapped children are turned into soldiers. Rescued girls speak of being married to their captors or pressured into conducting suicide bombings. If they comply, they are told, they will go to heaven. If they don’t, they’ll be killed.
“Militants feel it is easier to intimidate and brainwash young girls than adult women. Besides, these girls come cheap, and most of them are extremely loyal,” Yusuf Mohammed, who works with young people affected by trauma in Maiduguri, told the Daily Beast.
According to UNICEF, around 743,000 children have been uprooted by the conflict Nigeria’s northern states — as many as 10,000 of them are thought to be unaccompanied and uncared for, making them even more vulnerable to capture and exploitation as soldiers or suicide bombers. Turning victims into combatants can make the whole region feel like a war zone. Which, gender and radicalization expert Elizabeth Pearson said, is exactly what the group wants.
“Part of doing this is to make people fearful and to make the security in place seem ineffective and impotent, to demonstrate that even girls you can be afraid of, even women, who have not otherwise been combatants,” she told The Post in March. “The overall effect is to generate yet more insecurity, yet more fear and panic.”
Sarah Kaplan is a reporter for Morning Mix.
Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/05/27/how-boko-haram-is-turning-children-into-weapons/
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